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Cultegration and Borderdoom: New Frontiers of Democracy in the EU

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In the first part of my considerations, I will show that the migration
issue is a very important one, and because the borders of the EU are an
important part of how it is constituted, this issue has been shifted from an
economical and political rationale to a broader cultural justification. Riding
the wave of nativist and neopopulist sentiments, this kind of justification
feeds the enforcement of new principles that are very dangerous for both the
imperfect democracy we now have and any perspective of a radical democracy.

In a second part, I will explain the structural link between the regime
of the borders separating member states from surrounding countries (the flexible
frontier of Europe) and the internal constitution of the labour force. The
culturisation of migration policy (culitics
and polture) is closely linked to
Borderdoom. This produces what I call
cultegration, a regime, which is
itself linked to the semi-slave regime (bridled salariat)[1]
controlling permanent settlers, new entrants and minorities, and a good part of
their descendants as a de facto statute. The innerfrontier is the
real cause of the flexible outer frontier.

The Shift of
the Economic Management of the Immigration Issue to a Culturalisation of the
Borders

Europe has been displaying very restrictive migration policies since
1974, although influxes into the EU have roughly reached the figures for the
USA from 1975 to 1990 (between one and one and a half million per year for the
total entries), and, like the USA, it experienced an acceleration afterwards
(1995-2005). Depending on the category of people to be excluded, different
types of justification have been set. We can identify three types of justification
for the restrictive control of the Front Door (as opposed to the Back Door).

1.) The rationale for closing the borders to the influx of new permanent
workers was predominantly an economic one. The level of unemployment for
national or native and already present immigrants was so high (between 8 to 12
% of the active population at a macro level and much more at a local level)
that no more immigration was thinkable. This argument was almost immediately
contradicted by huge tensions in certain labour market segments (services,
agriculture, tourism: first industry in the Old Europe). And as soon as
economic growth showed signs of recovery (Spain and Portugal starting from
1986, Germany in 1988, UK in the 1990s, etc.) significant exceptions to the “closure”
of the border were “tolerated”. Undocumented migrations of all kinds (students
remaining after finishing their studies, tourists, family members rejoining
their parents, children or close relatives, seasonal workers, asylum seekers
denied the status of refugee, truly clandestine immigrants) have become a
permanent and ordinary symbol of an
increasingly segmented labour market. Nevertheless, all the governments of
member states of the EU have stuck to the “dogma” of closing the borders to new
active workers[2] and have
increasingly promoted the campaign against “illegal migration”.

Indeed such flagrant contradictions between facts and the official
position of the institutions has contributed to a decline in this kind of
legitimisation of closure and simultaneously to the rise of recurring waves of
xenophobia and the rebirth of far right-wing parties at significant levels
(from the British Enoch Powell and his influence on the Conservative Party in
the UK, to the two Schwarzenbach initiatives in Switzerland, not to mention the
French Front National, the Flemish fascist party, the Northern League in Italy,
or Haider’s party in Austria, and recent events in Denmark; now it seems that
these kinds of xenophobic sentiments are also playing a role in the upsurge of
nationalism and chauvinist parties in the former communist countries of Eastern
Europe). Clearly it is a serious understatement to maintain that populism, nativism are but a direct consequence of this incredible “malgoverno” (mis-government) on the question of immigration. This
peculiar form of un- or de-government is characterized by a denial of a
permanent and structural openness of the movement of people and workers in a
globalised world. Obviously this kind of denial and/or hypocrisy among the most
cynical leaders of political parties cannot be treated naively as simple
ignorance that serious knowledge and scientific expertise should and could
dissipate. The denial of the presence and importance of the shadow people of the EU (the 14 to 16
million people without political and civil rights within the biggest democracy
in the world, with India) can only be compared with the denial by the southern
plantation owners in the US of the slaves and freed slaves during the Jim Crow
era until the Civil Rights Laws of 1965.

In any case, the legitimisation of the closure of the European border on
the basis of economic reasons was seriously undermined by the intensification
of mobility due to chaotic globalisation in Africa and the Middle-East, and
also due to increasing pressure from the employers (now small firms rather than
big ones that prefer to outsource their manufacture) to reopen the border.
Consequently, the “technical” question is now more about how to reopen the
border so selectively that it would avoid giving space to the autonomy of the
movement of the labour force with its inescapable consequences at a political
and civic level. However, while the economic rationale for closing the gates of
EU has been declining, there have been experiments in raising two other kinds
of legitimisation.

2.) The migrant as the last subject un-citizen of the sovereignty of the
old nation-state: The repatriation, detention and deportation of undocumented
migrants (active population soon followed by families including children) have
reached such a point (22 detention camps within the borders of the EU and
projects to delocalize them outside the official, institutional borders within
the markets of the European Empire in Albania and Libya) that it cannot be seen
as a marginal and temporary phenomenon. This kind of permanent and structural
exception relies on a political reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the
nation-state, and it goes with a vision of Europe as a confederation of
nation-states (Schengen Agreement) or as a second life or rebirth of
sovereignty as opposed to globalisation. The dreadful politics of the
nation-states are further deteriorating as they are slowly but surely
dispossessed of their classical prerogatives in finance, money, spending,
funding. By describing themselves as “intraitables”
(uncompromising), a favourite saying among politicians pour la galerie (“une petite
phrase” for the prime time news on TV), democratic leaders deliberately
appeal to nativism and sovereignism. They know that this is but
nostalgia and that the marriage of both gives birth to a reaffirmation of the
most reactionary values (on sexuality, marriage, discipline, religion,
education, tolerance and so forth). However their calculations are inescapable
as long as no correction has been made in the democratic system. We face a
situation not very different from England in the 19th century before the
reforms of 1832 and 1860. Excluding a significant portion of the population
from the right to vote at a national level introduces not only a tremendous
bias in the often very narrow electoral swing, but it also creates a very
perverse opportunity: xenophobia, or attacks on groups and communities in a
democratic system can allow you to gain votes but also to lose[3].
European nativism is inevitable as long as a great portion of immigrants and
new settlers are not included as voters and xenophobia is always a winning
game. No institutional party has really been able to resist the temptation.

However, this reaffirmation of nation-state sovereignty has been
defeated and has revealed itself to be an illusion. The Schengen Agreement had
already signified a substantial transfer in competencies. The EU has introduced
immigration as a question of common interest, based on the principle of subsidiarity. Recently the most valuable
result (in terms of its impact on institutions) of the Ceuta & Melilla
assault and the new great exodus underway has been Spain’s prime minister
Zapatero’s call for interstate cooperation through the European administration
to tame the waves of Sub-Saharan African migrants (in Spain’s Canary Islands or
in Italy). This will lead to a communization and federalization of the
migration issue. Bene or male volens, nation-states will be
condemned to eat their hat.

But in terms of legitimisation, the kind of Guantanamization of the management of new influxes of immigrants,
the attempts to deport the children and wives of undocumented workers seem more
and more difficult to justify, inasmuch as in Europe, including the United
Kingdom, public opinion has been very reluctant to sustain any kind of serious
suspension of traditional democratic liberties, even under the “warfare”
created by bombers in Madrid or London. This is probably why we will see a real
decline (although alas! not a vanishing) of the sovereign argument. Will this
be enough to put a true democratisation of the EU in the question of borders
and the status of immigrant settlers on the agenda? I am afraid not: for two
very different reasons. The first one I will develop now is that the
legitimisation of the closure of the border (selectively, in this case) has
been shifted to the realm of culture. The second reason is that as long as we
keep the system of the juridical inferiorisation and discrimination of segments
of the labour force through the regime of temporary workers status (bonding
contract, restriction to leave the employer, denial of complete civil and
political right), the quality of the border will not change. This will be the
second part of my reflections. But let us come back to the last avatar of the
legitimisation of the Fortress Europe.

3.) Third but not least, a cultural justification for closing Europe off
to further migration has appeared. It has taken the shape of neo-populism (a
kind of European nativism) that has always been present on the far right wing
of the political spectrum. However, it soon overlapped with the debate on
extending the boundaries of the European Union, mainly with the entrance of
Turkey and the referendum on the constitution of 2005. Riots in the suburbs in
France, bombers in England have been read as the common failure of the two
opposite models (the French republican monocultural and the melting pot model and integration
through pluri-culturalist cultural policies in Britain). In the international
context of warfare and the so-called “clash of civilizations” between the
western world and Islamic fundamentalism, Turkey's membership has become a
divisive question on both the left and the right wing of the political arena.
The recent decision by French deputies in the National Assembly about
penalising denial of the Armenian genocide by Turkish army is quite
enlightening.

Questions embracing culture in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word
(anthropological way of life including the practise of religious cult) as well
as the French meaning (values, civilization) have been raised about a presumed
Christian or Enlightened “nature” or “identity” of Europe and the so-called
“logical”, ethical or political incompatibility of the enlargement of the EU to
include Turkey and soon to further countries that will increase its diversity
(the Slavic world [Ukraine], the Muslim world with any country of the Maghreb).

The cultural argument will play a predominant role in the coming years
inasmuch as the economic argument has been virtually abandoned due to strong
pressures for a return to a more dynamic growth.

Politics is a play on and a battle over words before any measure or
significant change can be introduced. Ideology as an effective force in politics
is above all a "logo-logy", if by logo we mean logos, rationale, the way in which words shape in advance the
grammar of correct or incorrect sentences. If culturalisation of the migration issue (regulations for entry,
immigrant new settlers' status in the labour market and in the city, access to
citizenship and nationality, “cultural” integration of second or third
generations) increasingly becomes the dominant way of dealing with the issue,
how can a political perspective of deepening democracy (radical democracy
instead of a reaffirmation of either an obsolete republicanism or an already
challenged multiculturalism) intervene? Is there a particular regime of
boundaries that would be compatible with a deepening of democracy and could
escape the kind of new serfdom that we can call “Borderdoom”?

Cultegration, Borderdoom and Inner Semi-Serfdom

Let us explain the strange words (monstrous, hybrid, if you like): Cultegration and Borderdoom are used in our title. Let us first consider the
following concatenation of words: culture, integration, ex-tegration, desegregation. By inventing the word cultegration, we aim to condense
integration through culture and religious cult affiliation, just as in real
life.

By cultegration we mean the
specific trope of political discourse, which justifies restrictive policies and
limits the rights of the foreign population of settlers. By extegration we mean the very peculiar
and paradoxical position of the foreign population in modern democracies and
states: internally they are integrated, but as foreigners they became
altogether integrated as a work force by the end of the 19th century, yet
excluded (denied) as human beings.[4]
This exclusion can be temporary (the gap between the primo-immigrant status,
whose worse situation is that of an undocumented immigrant, sometimes
transformed into a “potential terrorist” or prey to the mafia, and
naturalization which ends, at least formally, the exclusion from citizenship
and the right to vote). So called “temporary workers” are thus excluded from
the city (the reign of equality as citizens), even though they are true
settlers at the very moment they are incorporated as labour. So labour is
totally unequal in our democracies,
although their modernity (escaping from the authoritarian and fascist state
after the great crisis of the 1930s) consisted of relying upon work (waged) and
labour (acknowledgement of the unions) as constituent forces, yet always with
this exception for non-citizen workers.

This very peculiar trick is achieved by the nation-state when it
enforces the efficiency of its borders. Three modalities of the border can be
distinguished: a) The borderas a
geographical separation between two territories. As such this border does not
create special forms of domination; b) The second degree of the frontier or
border is what we call the borderdom.
By this word we mean the ordinary condition of people belonging to a given
territory when they enter a different territory for a temporary stay (for
tourism, for example, or for business travel). Following the constitution and
stabilization of modern nation-state in the 17th century, the entrant is not
integrated. He or she remains a stranger. Conditions of admission can be
discriminating in comparison with the status or advantages of the native
population, but they address the stranger as a foreign non-citizen, non subject and generally do not
interfere in his or her insertion in the labour market. c) The third kind of
border is what we call borderdoom. This means something quite different
from and worse than borderdom or border. This composite word conjoins border
and doom in analogy to Parishdoom.
Parishdoom[5]
was the nickname given by the poor to the Poor
Laws of 1660, which restricted them to their parish and forbade them to
move to another parish (to get married, for example), unless they were in
possession of a pass that was given
to them only if they had a contract of labour. Borderdoom hence means today a very particular regime of the
frontier imposed on the stranger as worker or on relatives in the country of
entrance. The result of this regime is that the in-worker is not an exogenous worker, an out-worker (coming for a short period, less than six months).
He/she is neither an endogenous
worker (like all the “national” workers and citizens), he/she is an inner but exogenous worker. Whereas
labour laws have become a specific kind of laws and have achieved an equal
condition for all workers, since the exchange of money for labour (the contract
of labour) has been separated from the commercial contract (and this has been
accompanied by an enlargement of access to civil and political rights on the
whole), the in-worker has remained exogenous. This has created a powerful
exception.

There is no better example of this than the clause of the country of
origin in the first draft of the Bolkestein Directive. What has been the
practise of each member state towards its own immigrants was supposed to be
applied to each of its citizens seeking work in another member state. Suddenly
the national (autochthonous) citizens have realised the consequences of this
artificial status. The labour code that they were subject to was not that of
the country where the job was performed, but the laws of the worker's country
of origin. In the ensuing vehement debate during and after the referendum on
the European Constitution, it was not sufficiently emphasized that this
scandalous statute designed for inner workers of the EU was precisely the same
as the basis for the employment of third-country immigrant workers in Europe or
Apartheid in the Republic of South Africa.

It has been noted[6]
that this status is clearly a remnant and a perpetual revival of the colonial
condition of subject and non-citizen under the European empires. Hence it is a
postcolonial statute.

If we wonder why this statute has been so firmly established and never
challenged, we must go back to the true rationale of all that sh…, to put it in
Marx' terms.

Borderdom, like serfdom, is a regime of mobility, of the control of
mobility (not only of discipline). Borderdoom is the result of this regime upon
people.

It is an old and permanent form of primitive accumulation from the very
beginnings of capitalism. When the mobility of the poor in the western Middle
Ages, the movement of Africans in the course of the disintegration of the
Sub-Saharan empires, the movement of the new subject of the modern absolutist
state in the 17th century, the flight of millions of the white European
proletariat to the New World, the massive emigration of Indians from Bengal, of
Chinese and the worldwide multitude from everywhere towards the big
metropolises of the North, were all turned into the new serfs, the indentured
white servants, the Black slaves, the Yellow coolies, the colonial inner
subject of the empires and the under-citizen or un-documented foreign immigrant
and temporary workers, we speak of the decomposition, disintegration of these
multitudes.

Two points deserve a mention. In each of these cases, peculiar, abnormal
forms of the exchange of money and labour are the decisive element. The
limitation of liberty is a counter-reaction to a genuine movement of flight, maronnage, and breach of the labour
contract. As Ira Berlin has pointed out in his ManyThousands Gone[7],
slavery (let us extend it to the semi-slavery of Europe) is not merely a story
of sadism and mental illness: it is a way to extract dependant labour and to
protect the already capitalist relationship during primitive accumulation. What
is at stake even in the utmost forms of barbarian violence, is that the
deprivation of basic rights has a very rational scope: that is to say, the
control of dependant labour through the organisation of society. If we recall
Ira Berlin’s distinction between a society with
slaves (mostly domestic) and a slave
society (within the plantation economy, which was the factory of the first
capitalism, the mercantile one), and we expand it to a society with inferior
labour or citizen and segmented labour (along the lines of race, gender, caste,
colour bar), we must speak of our modern western society (specially the
European one) as a semi-slave or bridled salaried society. As Tronti has shown,
capitalist control over labour has always followed the via maestra of the society in general against the particularity of
the worker’s interest[8].

Boundaries and barriers (religion, language, colour, nationality, any
kind of hetero-designed minorities) have become a cornerstone of the
segmentation or split of labour. Since boundaries themselves are not natural,
they are constantly shifting. A boundary that is set to divide, decompose, can
later become an element of re-composition after it has been appropriated by the
multitudes. And vice versa. However, one of the deepest and most resistant
boundaries is nationality. Nation (going back to Ernest Gellner's synthesis) is
characterized by a unified space of transaction, and an exo-education assumed
by the state instead of endo education of the elites. It is no coincidence that
education[9],
culture, common values, control of the practise of any religious cult are
becoming the criteria of selection for the labour market. When the classical
division of skilled/unskilled, national/non-national barriers weakens, culture
becomes not the way to integrate (this is the fairy tale of multiculturalism or
republicanism), but the way to re-segment the already unified multitudes and
fragment them into what Hobbes has always said of the multitudes: barbarians, a
population refusing to obey, warriors, bands and rogues. The mob instead of the
people as subject of the sovereign.

Cultegration is unfortunately promising a brilliant future in the warfare of all against all, unless we
demand, as the abolitionists did, and after them the Blacks in the US and the
South Africans, the abolition of semi-serfdom on the labour market. Which means
in Europe the end of the regime of the pass (residence and work permits) for
non-citizen subjects. Otherwise the inner boundaries and bondage of labour,
reproduced in everyday life, will produce flexible boundaries and external
frontiers of the EU, the detention and deportation camp. And finally borderdoom, the doom of the border.

[2] French INSEE, the
most important scientific institute for statistics, deserves a particular
mention. For twenty years it maintained that the migration net balance was zero
(with as many returnees than new entrants). In early 2000 it had to give up
this hypothesis (so useful to the discourse of the government, whether it is
oriented to the right or the left).

[9] The question of
education (an alleged degradation of the educational system due to too many
immigrant children in school) has played a very important role in the shift
towards right-wing positions by influential intellectuals like A. Finkielkraut,
R. Debray and J.-C. Milner. See D. Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires,
Paris, La République des Idées/Le Seuil, 2002.